Hans Blix

Hans Blix (born in Uppsala, Sweden on June 28, 1928) was the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission during its operations in Iraq during 2000-2003.

Blix had previously been the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (1981-1997) and Minister for Foreign Affairs of Sweden (1978-1979).

In the build up to the invasion of Iraq, which started well before September 11th 2001, he was subject to a smear campaign by the Bush Administration. This was because the inspectors under his command repeatedly discovered no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, which was not what the neoconservative administration required in its pursuit of a new order in the Middle East.

After three years he left his job and returned to Stockholm and said in an interview with The Guardian of the UK "I was smeared by the Pentagon whose spread things around, who planted nasty things in the media. Those bastards pursued me for three years." (He later admitted that the term "bastards" was stronger than he had intended, and said he'd picked the term up whilst a student in the UK and thought it was quite mild.)

In his report to the UN Security Council on February 14, 2003, Blix claimed that "If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament -- under resolution 687 -- could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided."  This contradicts stated U.S. policy throughout the 1990s, which was to maintain sanctions whatever the Iraqi regime did..


 * Commissioner, Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission
 * President, World Federation of United Nations Associations
 * Advisory Council, European Policy Centre
 * Winner of the 2003 Olof Palme Prize

See also:
 * Mohamed ElBaradei
 * Scott Ritter
 * 2003 invasion of Iraq
 * Iraq Survey Group